On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 7:23 PM, Alex Eftimiades
<alexeftimiades at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since I always have the pages searched by group, it seems like in this case
> it might still make sense to create separate tables for each group because
> for every direct page request, every page in the database will be read. With
> separate tables for different groups you would only have to pull up the
> tables in the groups you are searching in.
Probably the term most helpful for research on this topic would be
"normalizing" or "normalized". Splitting the page-table into multiple
tables would be non-standard, inefficient, and unnecessarily
complicated with 0 (probably negative) performance improvement.
Databases implement indices that solve this problem at a low level
(within the DBMS engine) without having to do it at a high level
(i.e., with PHP). This frees the programmer to work elegantly and
still achieve reasonable (much better, in fact) levels of performance.
-Peter